Gamification In News : October 2017

By the time I spotted the shotgun, it was too late. I feel a sting in my thigh. I’ve been hit. I was distracted by the hysterical wife, while my partner was dealing with a nosy neighbor. We get off thirteen shots, all high, merely grazing the assailant.

Share this article There is an inherent problem with politics in the UK, in that it’s painfully obtuse at times. The language we use, the frames of reference, the innumerable intricacies surrounding policy. Political discourse is often impenetrable, and it leaves those without a proper grounding completely adrift.

Two years after launching its smoking cessation app Quitter’s Circle, pharmaceutical company Pfizer is seeing impressive continued engagement with the app. It’s also applying the lessons learned from Quitter’s Circle toward other mobile health pursuits – including a recently-launched app for people living with cancer.

There’s no denying that training has become an important element for any crew, and it’s not just limited to obtaining tickets as you progress through your career. Some of those elements can be essential for the safe operation of yachts – firefighting, for example – but there are other elements that can also be useful even if not focused on technical operations.

Seasoned healthcare executives and physician entrepreneurs announce the launch of MintHealth, a portable, secure, and self-sovereign personal health record (PHR) built using blockchain technology. This global decentralized health platform will align all healthcare stakeholders around the shared goal of empowering patients to minimize their risk for developing and suffering complications of chronic conditions.

This is because, with all the ingredients at its disposal, it’s got the main one right – technology. When Brits think pizza delivery, the overwhelming majority think Domino’s. The reason that the brand is so embedded in our public psyche is not because it is the world’s best pizza, it’s because it is effortless.

Group fitness is a term that helps explain an important evolutionary leap forward. The fitness of the group increases chances of survival. History shows cooperation works better than individualism. Our social nature is a necessary key in dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom.

Exercise competition significantly increases the number of steps taken per day It also makes participants significantly more likely to achieve their fitness goals Friendly competition adds around 1,700 steps to participant’s daily counts This is around a mile, and is more than twice that of those who don’t take part Experts believe competition gives people the ‘extra sauce’ for motivation FitBit rivalry helps families get active, new research reveals.

Now, taking the role of Majid, it’s your responsibility to help guide and support Nour during her journey. She’ll ask you for advice on the many (often upsetting) decisions she’ll have to make along the way, and responds in pseudo-real time, which means you’ll often be left wondering if Nour is alright, and if not, if your suggestions are to blame.

Today’s Nobel Prize winner in economics, Richard H. Thaler, helped pioneer research in the field of behavioral economics, providing insights about the gap between the rational, ideal economic option, and the decision we may make anyway, even when it’s not in our best interests.

Self-improvement is the gospel of the wellness set, and we can learn a lot about personal growth when we’re able to get a glimpse into the ways in which elite fitness and yoga trainers master their mind-body connections. Yogi Tara Stiles, CrossFit star Kenny Santucci, celebrity personal trainer Todd McCullough, and trainer and Ph.D.

Writing on Consumer Tech & Social Media with a satirical, cynical edge Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The economy of air travel as a bonus for spending money has been pretty straightforward for many years.

Level up! is a Moodle plugin that adds gamification cues to a Moodle course or site in just a few clicks. It first emerged during a “Project Week” at Moodle HQ back in 2014. Since then, the plugin has only grown and, as of September 2017, more than 2,200 Moodle sites have reported using it.

One of the hardest habits to break is smoking which has many physical and mental repercussions. As a costly addiction that millions around the world are trying to quit, the chemical dependency of cigarettes makes it extremely difficult to give up.

Any human advancement has been fraught with the opportunity for misuse and abuse, and the internet, with its avenues for diversion and entertainment, is no different. In recent years, psychologists and society at large have begun wrestling with the problems of screen addiction and its corollaries in online pornography addiction, gambling addiction and gaming addiction more broadly.

By now it’s old news that teens are not using Facebook as much as Facebook had hoped. Instead, they’re opting for Instagram, Whatsapp or SnapChat as cooler, more authentic alternatives. To re-invigorate its youth appeal, Facebook just bought an interesting app that’s garnered a healthy teen following in the last few months.

FAIRFAX, Va., Oct. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Ric and Jean Edelman, founders of Edelman Financial Services, have offered a $25 million donation to the XPRIZE competition focused on Alzheimer’s, supporting development of innovative approaches to combat Alzheimer’s disease. Their announcement was made at last week’s 2017 XPRIZE Visioneers Summit, held in Southern California.

There’s one word that links all the BookTech Company of the Year 2017 finalists, and it’s not technology. It’s reading. Each of the six companies engages with the written word – grabbing the attention of children through immersive storytelling, connecting authors with readers, delivering books to your door, or sharing reading and writing with friends – to promote reading for life.

Growth has been the dominant theme in the cannabis market. Estimates by Forbes put the legal cannabis market at a value of $7.2 billion (per a February 2017 report), and the market is expected to generate more jobs than government, manufacturing, or utilities in the coming years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Every time you log onto Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to share a photo or post an article, you give up a piece of yourself in exchange for entertainment. This is the way of the modern world: Smart companies build apps and websites that keep our eyeballs engaged, and we reward them with our data and attention, which benefit their bottom line.

Lumos Labs has had more than 85 million downloads for its brain-training games since 2007. Now the company is launching four new math titles aimed at making learning math more fun. The four games are adaptive, meaning they adjust the difficulty based on how well the player is doing.

Last week Deloitte announced one of its largest investments at US$20 million over three years in Singapore to create a Future of Work Centre of Excellence in Singapore. Last month Mercer announced the formation of Mercer Digital to offer digital solutions for the workforce of the future.

Since Pokemon Go’s launch in July last year, the Augmented Reality phenomenon has been downloaded over 750 million times and made more than $1.5 billion. That’s not a typo. While more than 80 per cent of players (myself included) haven’t opened the app in months, 60 million people are still playing today.

The scene is a virtual construction site. By clicking the ‘play’ button that appears on your mobile or computer screen you enter the site. You walk towards an office located amid half constructed buildings, trucks, cement sacks and cranes. The site officer gives you your first task – operate a crawler crane.

HRD chats to Sabine Hansen-Peck, global head of HR at Amadeus, about the challenges of attracting and retaining talent, and the many benefits of using gamification. Can you outline your role at Amadeus IT Group? It’s a global role and I’m responsible for the people & culture function across 15,000 employees.

As new learning models continued to evolve this year, like micro-learning and gamification, some trends are just on the rise. What should L&D and HR professionals be looking for in the coming year? We delve into a few of the newest trends in employee development and learning.

In 2017, the human resources industry has done a lot of soul searching about the way culture and performance issues were handled within companies. In 2018, another big internal shift is coming, but this time the focus is on technology: how it can be used to find people, connect people, engage people, even replace people – and what to do when that happens.

(Reuters Health) – When fitness trackers alone fail to get families moving enough, turning step counts into a competition might help people get more exercise, a small experiment suggests. Researchers gave fitness trackers to 200 adults and asked them to set daily step count goals to increase their activity levels.

Exercise-focused video games-like those Wii sports titles that merged playing with exercising-have showed some promise in getting generally lazy kids (and adults) off their couches. More recently, smartphone games like Pokémon Go and the emergence of quality virtual reality games are continuing the trend.

Millennials, whether fair or not, do not have a great reputation. This group of people, born sometime between 1980 and 2000 are, according to some, lazy, entitled, narcissistic and more interested in their smartphones than human interaction. Yet others praise their work ethic and argue that businesses need to recognise their potential.

Throughout the last few years, we have witnessed the race to market for seamless autonomous driving technology within the shortest possible timeframe. It’s clear that one of the biggest hurdles lies in preparing autonomous vehicles (AVs) to navigate the many uncontrollable and unexpected obstacles that face drivers on any given journey.

The talent gap within STEM is a constant problem but is gaming the answer? STEM.org founder Andrew B Raupp investigates. The global movement to increase access to STEM educational opportunities, and ultimately increase the flow of talent into the pipeline for professions in the STEM field, is continuing to grow.

Is motivating people a game? It sounds Machiavellian, but technology is transforming the incentive industry and how to motivate channel partners and end users. Human motivation and its impact on business is a complex topic.

Language education platform Duolingo boasts more than 200m subscribers worldwide and speaking today at Canvas, a product innovation and design conference held in Birmingham, Zan Gilani, associate product manager at Duolingo, puts much of that global success down to the company’s four-pronged gamification strategy created to keep those users compig back for more.

SumTotal has announced a new version of its SumTotal Talent Expansion Suite. It has extended the capability in three areas. The Talent acquisition and recruiting suite is redesigned. There is extended support for xAPI, the experience API that is an elearning software specification to integrate elearning platforms. SumTotal has also extended the use of gamification in the solution.

THE disruption of the financial services industry, which began as a trickle, is quickly turning into a flood as start-ups introduce innovative products and services designed for a new generation of consumers, and the established providers are forced to reinvent themselves.

Most dating apps treat their users like children. Their designs feature bright colors and interactive gimmicks. It’s dehumanizing. Apps shouldn’t represent singles like characters in a video game. Worst of all, that sort of gamification takes the focus off meeting up in real life.

Ed tech startup Labster whose software platform enables virtual simulations of laboratories for teaching life science to students, has closed a $10 million Series A round of funding led by early stage European VC firm Balderton Capital.

Health app scammer fined $320,000. Belle Gibson, an Australian health blogger who faked brain cancer to promote her cookbook and app The Whole Pantry, has been fined $320,000 ($410,000 in Australian dollars) by her government.

We have a cooking crisis on our hands. At least that’s if you believe those who suggest Millennials are not mastering basic physical world skills – like cooking – as they wile away the hours staring at screens. While surveys, including our own, have shown that Millennials are in fact cooking, there’s no doubt they…

If competition in the augmented reality space was a spectator sport, then ARKit, ARCore, and HoloLens dominate the prime-time broadcasts on ESPN. If you’re looking for the race to be the “Cardboard for AR,” you might need to tune-in to ESPN2. There, you would learn that Mira has taken the lead.

In engineering, the Boil Out procedure involves decontaminating bitumen sprayers and tankers once water has become present. The mixing of water and bitumen can create a “boil over” effect, where bitumen can be sprayed with considerable force over a wide area. Needless to say, it puts people’s safety at risk.

Did you clean up after your dog while taking it for walkies recently? If so, you may have been unwittingly influenced by so-called ‘nudge theory’ – the idea that by giving people small nudges you can influence behaviour on the large scale.

Technology services businesses are used to change. Veterans in the $160-billion industry employing almost 4 million engineers fondly recall how they caught up each time technology changed – from client-server to business software (oh, that ERP!), web, internet, cloud and more.

Today’s Nobel Prize winner in economics, Richard H. Thaler, helped pioneer research in the field of behavioral economics, providing insights about the gap between the rational, ideal economic option, and the decision we may make anyway, even when it’s not in our best interests.

Webflow at first glance is just another internet tool for designing web pages. After you blink and start scrolling, you’ll quickly release the comprehensive tool in front of you. Webflow is an all-in-one web design platform for designing and launching web sites and applications.

Commercial vehicle companies that own large fleets face immense challenges in managing the same. There are several issues such as poor driving, pilferage of goods and fuel and absence of real time vehicle information which leads to a lot of operational inefficiencies and safety concerns.

If Billy Mays was still alive and sold smart home tech, he’d be shouting at you about the WyzeCam from Wyze Labs. When it comes to smart tech products there is usually a misconception that more expensive means better. The WyzeCam is a fully functional smart home camera for the low, low price of $20.

Group fitness is a term that helps explain an important evolutionary leap forward. The fitness of the group increases chances of survival. History shows cooperation works better than individualism. Our social nature is a necessary key in dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom.

Millennials are projected to make up about 33% of the U.S. workforce, with that number rising to 75% by 2025. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over five million Millennials are in sales roles. Millennials are also known for job hopping.

Digital is the new order of the day, whether it is about ordering your morning coffee through a mobile app or turning in your day’s work on the cloud. Digital technologies have started to encompass every aspect of our professional and personal lives.

According to Barikor, “Squat racks, a bench press and an elliptical trainers are all effective if you’re confident about doing it at home by yourself, but do bear in mind that there’s always a safety aspect.” More advanced home gyms require space and money.

When I think back to the demons of my childhood, I almost always linger longest on the rust monster. Though it resembled a crudely drawn armadillo, it was the size of a mountain lion. Other, more dangerous, beasts lived in the caves where I found it; there were neither claws on its three-toed feet nor fangs in its mouth.

The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the Idenitarian march in Germany. | Images via Wikipedia Commons/ Getty. This article originally appeared on VICE Canada. The extreme right is increasingly sophisticated, globalized, and actively recruiting young people, a grim new study says.

Health insurers and self-insured employers are leading the adoption of more-personalized and holistic approaches to managing chronic conditions such as diabetes, COPD and depression. The new approaches aim to change patient behaviors with the aid of digital technologies, thereby lowering health care costs, according to Chilmark Research’s report, ” Assessing the Market for Condition Management Solutions.”

As we head further into the end of Q’4, November means something very significant for brands in China. 11.11, or Singles Day, is a massive retail day in the region. However, with companies like Tencent has now opened up ways for U.S.

Instances of aggressive company cultures have, once again, put the spotlight on organisational culture and understanding what it actually means. A healthy work environment not only ensures a happier workplace but also greater returns on profitability and revenue. Being intentional about your organisation’s culture can go a long way in guiding how your organisation grows.

When most people think of virtual reality, they think of it as an escape or an alternative to real-life, they worry about the potential consequences of people becoming obsessed with living in a virtual world. This distorted view of the technology retracts from the plethora of potential real world applications that could change the way we live and interact with the world for the better.

Coffee behemoth Starbucks is reaching a tipping point in the US: same-store-sales growth is slowing as the chain nears full penetration and its digital efforts fail to keep up with competitors like Panera. Despite these struggles, RBC Capital Markets restaurant and packaged-foods analyst David Palmer remains bullish on Starbucks, giving its stock a $63 price target.